NEMESIS: Board Project – The Tabletop Hub

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About the Project

Hey everybody! Sam here, aka MrStainless, aka Sam from the Tabletop Hub. So earlier this year I very happily backed Nemesis and as I wait for the game to get here I thought it would be really cool if I had a physical tabletop terrain piece to play the game in rather than on a flat and slightly boring game board.
Hence this project! I've never undertaken something like this so if anything, it'll be an interesting journey. Expect many photos and video updates!

This Project is Active

Hey everyone! It’s been a while since I’ve pushed an update for this project, while we got off to a great start I hit a brick wall where I couldn’t begin properly sketching out and planning the game board without some very important measurements from the game pieces.

Thankfully this just arrived today!

Basically having the room tiles from the game and the miniatures themselves will help me figure out how wide the corridors need to be, how big the rooms need to be in order to fit in the room tiles etc.

We’ve still got a long road ahead but at least we’ve now got everything we need!

Hey everyone! It’s been a productive weekend for the Nemesis board project, so as I mentioned in the last update what I wanted to do was take the game board that we have in the actual designs from Awaken Realms and make it functional for MDF/ laser cutting and equally make the board larger to make it more imposing on the tabletop.

What this consisted of was me taking the print-outs of the game board from last update and tracing the layouts. The first draft of this ended pretty quickly:

In this first draft I was basically trying to copy the game board as-is, one thing I began to notice though was that I couldn’t figure out how I’d get those angular corners for the rooms and for some of the corridors. After all this is the first time I’ve ever designed and created a laser-cut piece of tabletop terrain and it goes without saying that I’m going to be a pretty massive rookie at it all.

Therefore my designs have to replicate my skill level…

Basically…they have to be idiot-proof.

So I booted up the Weekender and went back to the literal drawing board. This time around I wanted to make everything a LOT simpler, in essence I started to design with the mentality of ‘if this was being built in Minecraft, how would I build it.‘

So in essence hard corners, sharp angles etc and after a couple of cups of tea, this is what I’ve come up with:

So, before we start celebrating there’s a few things.

Thankfully because this is all being designed on tracing paper, we can actually assign a scale to all of this to help with the designing process, BUT:

Some of the rooms need redesigning, there are some instances where, for instance, the room’s aren’t symmetrical etc and that will irk me going forward, BUT, at least we’ve got the framework.

One thing I need to find out is the importance of the board locations, on some of the rooms and in some of the corridors there are certain numbers which I assume have some importance to gameplay, what I need to do is go and watch a few Let’s Plays of the game from the Kickstarter (or pester Awaken Realms more) to find out more info on this as this will need to translate into the designs, after all the table needs to be functional and work with the game mechanics.

Finally, we need to figure out how big the mini’s are to help with the room scaling but we’ll get to that as we go.

But folks that’s it for now, we’re making solid progress and we’ve got a framework, we now enter a process of refinement.

So last night I launched this project and today I’m getting stuck in to the planning, after all there’s no time like the present! That, and I know there’s going to be a lot of design work needed on this one before I can actually get to the point where I’m able to physically build or paint anything.

If anything I’m anticipating that that section of this project will be the easiest!

So the main thing we knew from the Nemesis Kickstarter was that the game board had dimensions of 84x56cm. There are a lot of parts to the game from inserts which indicate which room is which to the models themselves so I knew there was no way we could, or would, be using the original game board dimensions.

My first step was to print out the board at a size roughly the same as it will be, hence the 4 A3 pages above but that system didn’t prove very effective.

So, I’m not onto stage 2:

This is the entire board printed out onto A3, this will enable me to make rough sketches to begin with, there are a lot of angular curves and bends in the board that I most likely wont be able to replicate very well with laser cut MDF.

So I’m going to try and smooth out the curves and make everything more angular. Once I have the rough layout of the board, I can work out how big it needs to be from there.

Already though in my head I think having it be about 4ft x 6ft could be a really good size. I realise that it would be a mammoth board piece but I’d consider splitting it up into two 4x3ft boards for easier storage and movement.

So, back to the drawing board literally! I’ll keep you all updated.

Also massive thankyou to the team at Awaken Realms who are very kindly answering all of my pestering questions 🙂

Hey everyone! So as if I didn’t have enough to be getting on with with my painting backlog, work, life and everything in-between I’ve had an idea for a hobby project I just can’t shake.

So earlier this year I very happily backed Nemesis by Awaken Realms during their Kickstarter campaign. In the past week I’ve realised that it’ll soon be in my hands in the next couple of months (if the shipping gods are kind that is).

If you don’t know what Nemesis is by the way it’s a very cool looking semi co-operative game where you must fight to survive against some pretty gruesome looking aliens. From the first time I saw this I basically couldn’t shake the feeling that it was, in essence, ALIEN the board game so as a massive fan of the film franchise I thought it would be fitting to play the game on a board worthy of a homage.

What I’m going to aim to do is recreate the gameboard for Nemesis in MDF so that I, and the wonderful mini’s, have an immersive space to play in. I’ve never undertaken a project like this before but I’m hoping that with enough time and the wonderful feedback and tips from this community I’ll find a way.

So far the only image I have of the gameboard is the one above which is from the Kickstarter campaign, my first step is to try and get a hold of a high-res layout of the game board so that I can begin creating measurements.

To this end I’ve contacted the folks over at Awaken Realms who are kindly going to help me on this front.

Once I have that I’m going to start planning how big the game space will be/ needs to be and then start going from there. Thankfully with the game board the framework is there, it’s just making it all work together.

Either way, hopefully you’ll join me for this journey and we’ll have a cool board at the end of it!